Erik Wilde on Services and APIs

Tuesday, April 06, 2010

HTML5 File Writer API

file access in the HTML5 world (based on the fuzzy definition of HTML5 as anything that attempts to turn the browser into a richer
programming platform) has so far been limited to read access through the File API. today, the W3C published the first draft for the File API: Writer specification, which extends file access functionality to also cover write access. the document was
published by the Device APIs
and Policy Working Group, and it now has been added to the HTML5
API Overview.

like with many other HTML5 APIs (such as the recently published Capture API), it is likely that the specification will change substantially before it reaches maturity, or it may never actually reach maturity and just be abandoned. for example, instead of having separate APIs for read and write access to files, it probably would more make sense to just have one API, and the write part simply would not be supported by all implementations. but regardless of how this API evolves, it certainly will be interesting to see when and where it is first implemented.

@jon: http://dev.w3.org/html5/postmsg/ is not dead but it also is not an official draft (yet). i decided to only include drafts which have been officially published as w3c drafts. but thanks for the reminder, and maybe this one will become official pretty soon.

Instead of having separate APIs for read and write access to files, it probably would more make sense to just have one API, and the write part simply would not be supported by all implementations. but regardless of how this API evolves, it certainly will be interesting to see when and where it is first implemented.